When comparing pico vs Emacs, the Slant community recommends Emacs for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal editors?”Emacs is ranked 4th while pico is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose Emacs is:

Emacs can be controlled entirely with the keyboard. While true, I often find the mouse and menus handy for those lesser-used commands. An aide-memoir.

Pros

Pro

Built-in cheat sheet for shortcuts

Pro

Easy to use

Pico includes only the bare minimum of functionality needed to edit documents making it very simple.

Pro

Keyboard-focused, mouse-free editing

Emacs can be controlled entirely with the keyboard. While true, I often find the mouse and menus handy for those lesser-used commands. An aide-memoir.

Pro

Total customizability

Customizations can be made to a wide range of Emacs' functions through a Lisp dialect (Emacs Lisp). A robust list of existing Lisp extensions include the practical (git integration, syntax highlighting, etc) to the utilitarian (calculators, calendars) to the sublime (chess, Eliza).

Pro

It's also an IDE

You can debug, compile, manage files, integrate with version control systems, etc. All through the various plugins that can be installed.

Pro

Works in terminal or as a GUI application

You can use Emacs' command line interface or graphical user interface.

Pro

Self documenting

Emacs has extensive help support built-in as well as a tutorial accessed with C-h t.

Pro

Great documentation

With 30+ years of use the Emacs documentation is very thorough. There are also a lot of tutorials and guides written by third parties.

Pro

Free

Licensed under GNU GPL.

Pro

Mini buffer

You can pass complicated arguments in the mini buffer.

Pro

Ubiquity

Fully compliant GNU-emacs is available on many platforms, and they all understand .emacs configuration files.

Pro

Has been widely used for a long time

Pro

Cross-platform

Pro

Enormous range of functionalities (way beyond simple "text editing")

Through its programmability, a very broad range of functionalities can be integrated in emacs, turning it even into a "single point of contact" with the underlying operating system.

Pro

GTK+ widgets support

Since version 25 you can run GTK widgets inside Emacs buffers. One of these is the WebKitGTK+, which allows the user to run a full-featured web browser inside Emacs with JavaScript and CSS support among other things.

Pro

Helm plugin adds even more power to Emacs

Pro

Integrates planning in your development process

You can jump straight from your org-mode files to programming tasks - and back - and build a seamless workflow.

Pro

Gnus

Managing several large mailing lists has never been easier using Gnus. The threading commands and the various ways of scoring articles means that I never miss important messages/authors, etc. A joy to use.

Pro

eshell is cross platform

Pro

Interactive Shells

Emacs has a number of shell variants: ansi-term, shell, and eshell.

Pro

Versatile

Emacs is great for everything.

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Cons

Con

No way to override command characters

Characters such as ^D, ^T, ^L, etc will always be interpreted as commands and there's no way to write them in text.

Con

Lacks some commonly expected functionality even for a basic editor

Pico lacks search and replace functionality as well as the ability to work work with multiple files at the same time.

Con

Learning curve is long

While it's better than it used to be, with most functions being possible through the menu, Emacs is still quite a bit different from your standard editor. You'll need to learn new keyboard shortcuts.

Using Emacs on a new machine without your .emacs file

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